Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD

Wow, I am excited to test this on iMac!
I don't know how much access you have to the insides of your iMac. If it's easy as pop the door and SATA is right there - then I suggest using SATA. It's faster and drive model is recognized easily by the tool.
If not, then use USB-to-SATA.

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Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).

Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?

Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).

Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?

Pulled the 320GB drive out of my almost new premiere, hooked both up to my desktop, boot of CD, follow prompts (I didn't have a laptop in the same room to pull up Comer's instructions, so I just booted off the CD).

So easy to use, took 3 hours or so to copy over, done, plug into tivo, boot up, 2TB of storage goodness.

Compared to the "good ole days" of upgrading Directivos to 120GB harddrives using MFS and command lines tools, this was a piece of cake.

I upgraded my HD last year with a DVRDUDE drive, that was obviously easier from a "don't have to mess w/ a PC" perspective, but you lose all your settings etc.

Wow, I am excited to test this on iMac!
I don't know how much access you have to the insides of your iMac. If it's easy as pop the door and SATA is right there - then I suggest using SATA. It's faster and drive model is recognized easily by the tool.
If not, then use USB-to-SATA.

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Just as an FYI, Apple computers do not have SATA or eSATA ports&#8230;at all. (There's a third party upgrade to the new 27" iMac that will add an eSATA connection but you have to send it in, yadda, yadda). Apple has chosen to use Firewire 800/1394b instead of eSATA. iMac's are fully self contained. (See here) There are no "doors" on an iMac and zero access to anything inside by the normal user&#8230;or even the advanced user for that matter. The Mac Pro line is the only computer that allows internal access of any sort, at least of the nature that PC owners are used to. I love my iMac and our other Macs and would never ever return to using PC's (for anything but upgrading TiVo's ), but when it comes to upgrades such as Linux/Windows boxes are capable of they are limited.

Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).

Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?

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Rather than buying those adapters I'd highly recommend buying a USB/SATA dock instead. Here's one that I have connected to my iMac:

You can even buy one that will allow you to mount two drives (ostensibly the TiVo drive and the new drive) at the same time. They are great for swapping out hard drives down the road where the little adapters are a bit cumbersome.

Although I have a PC I built and use for TiVo upgrades and planned on using it to upgrade our Premiere XL, I'd also be interested in seeing how things go with a Mac. I burned a copy of Comer's program so I'll pop it in my iMac after I post this and report back if it'll boot up or if it blew up&#8230;ha!

Happy upgrading!

EDIT/UPDATE: The good news is that the iMac will start up using the jmfs Live CD. The possibly bad news is that although I had my TiVo Series3 OEM hard drive in my USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac, the program did not recognize it. So I'm not sure if it's a case of it being a Series3 drive Vs a Premiere that's an issue or if it's a Mac/USB port recognition issue. In any case, the program will run on a mac (use the Option key to boot up - oddly enough the disk shows up as "Windows"). If it is a port issue it might be that you'd have to use Boot Camp or VMWare Fusion or Parallels with a Linux OS (Ubuntu, Centos, etc.) to make this work with a Mac. I haven't cracked my Premiere XL open yet. (I haven't purchased a 2TB HDD for an upgrade yet either). So if I find time I may pull the Premiere's drive and give it a try to see how it goes.

UPDATE II: Success (thus far)! I pulled our TiVo Premiere XL's hard drive and inserted in the USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac. I booted up the iMac with the jmfs Live CD. Everything went normally and the program recognized the Premiere's hard drive asking if I would like to copy or expand it. I don't have a 2TB drive yet so I shut the program down and will have to wait until I, akaussie or some other brave soul tries to upgrade using a Mac. However it would appear at this point that it will work.

Just as an FYI, Apple computers do not have SATA or eSATA ports at all.

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Good to know! I wonder if they have specially built firewire HD inside, probably not, eh?

The good news is that the iMac will start up using the jmfs Live CD.

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Perfect! I was worried that some drivers were missing as the CD is based on a small linux distro.

The possibly bad news is that although I had my TiVo Series3 OEM hard drive in my USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac, the program did not recognize it. So I'm not sure if it's a case of it being a Series3 drive Vs a Premiere that's an issue or if it's a Mac/USB port recognition issue.

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I wonder exactly the same thing. Would you be able to get "log.log" out?

Yikes! That's a terrible price. (Or is that just an example and the store nearby is giving them away? ) You can generally find 2TB drives for ~ $100 to ~$125 on sale now.

Yes, in a sense it does matter what drive you use. Unless you just can't wait I'd order one of the WD or Hitatchi drives discussed earlier. AFAIK no one is using Seagate drives for these upgrades to date, so no known data exists. It's generally better to stick with what's been proven successful. YMMV of course.

I'm sure others will chime in but you can see this post on the cousin to this thread for more thoughts

Also (This SHOULD go without saying) plug the Tivo into a UPS!! Even a small one to deal with momentary power blips will go a long way to keeping the hard drive healthy! Hard drives don't like to even really be shut down, let alone just lose power completely.

Also (This SHOULD go without saying) plug the Tivo into a UPS!! Even a small one to deal with momentary power blips will go a long way to keeping the hard drive healthy! Hard drives don't like to even really be shut down, let alone just lose power completely.

Rich - Thanks for the information on iMac's. I just had a chance to boot up using the bootdisk and it booted fine.
I don't yet have my Tivo (or a new hard drive) so I can't test anything additional yet.
I'm hoping that is was a glitch because of your drive being from an S3.

The high price you saw for the Seagate drive that I linked above is the list price. The store where I shop sells this thing for a discount. My discounted price will be about $125 or so.

I have used Seagate drives in the past and they were fine. Are they really bad now?

TC

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I wouldn't say Seagate drives are "bad" by any means. Lots of folks are using them including yours truly and lots of folks are happy with them. However they used to be at the very top of the QC totem once but based on posts found almost anywhere now, that came to an end a couple of years ago. Perhaps they've just had a run of pretty bad luck here and there but it appears things have changed.

Also as mentioned, they haven't been used for upgrades for any of the TiVo's for quite a while now and AFAIK, none with the Premieres. I don't have any reason to believe that particular drive wouldn't work, but there are some that have been problematic and have never been on the recommended list. The other thing to consider is noise. Since the one you're looking at is a 5900 RPM drive I suspect that it's reasonably quiet, but they didn't publish the acoustic specs so it's hard to say. Unfortunately due to a lawsuit Seagate lost long ago the drive acoustics (AAM) cannot be adjusted on Seagate hard drive so you're saddled with whatever you get. I have one of their DB35 line of dedicated A/V drives and it's been stellar for years and is almost silent (seek noise rated at 23db idle). I also have one of their Barracuda 7200RPM drives and it sounds like a thrashing machine (rated at 33dB).

In any case, for that price I'd opt for one of the WD GP AV drives like this one:

Comer, akaussie and friends&#8230;curiosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.

So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.

Comer, akaussie and friends curiosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.

So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.

Comer, akaussie and friends curiosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.

So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.

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It'll prolly be the second week of October before I can upgrade. UPS isn't delivering my unit until Monday and Comcast isn't coming out until Saturday the 2nd to install the cablecard. I want to give it a few days to run before I pull the hard drive just in case any issues crop up.
Very encouraging news though! I'll post once I try it out.

So it looks like lots of people are having success upgrading to 2 TB. I am curious. Are most of the people only using the Wizard from the CD they burn? How many people have had to use command line as well as the wizard? I am trying to decide if I should buy the regular premiere and upgrade to a 2 TB drive or just buy a XL. Please advise.

So it looks like lots of people are having success upgrading to 2 TB. I am curious. Are most of the people only using the Wizard from the CD they burn? How many people have had to use command line as well as the wizard? I am trying to decide if I should buy the regular premiere and upgrade to a 2 TB drive or just buy a XL. Please advise.

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I am not sure I understand how those 2 things are related
You can buy regular Premiere and use either guide or command line. Or you can buy XL and won't have to use CD at all.

Comer, i guess i am looking for instructions. because in the first post I see download the file. But I am just trying do determine what all is needed to be done to see if I can make it work. If I cannot, then buying the XL would be the option so I can have at least a TB. From your post it appears you upgrade the regular premiere all you need to do is go through the guide.

If you get a XL, can you not upgrade that to a 2 TB drive? Or are you saying you just pull the drive and copy over existing drive to new drive and it can already see all of the space on the new drive?